Hello everyone! It is another issue of Yii news. As usual, we have Yii 2 releases, Yii 3 updates, important Yii 1 updates and other news. Have a good read and stay healthy. - Alexander Makarov

Foundation

Since last time I had to spend some time taking care about the foundation. Notable, the way funds are transferred from GitHub Sponsors to OpenCollective. They went from GitHub alright but where to was a big question. It took time to figure it out but now it's solved.

Another foundation-related thing is that the author of httpsoft/http-message, Evgeniy Zyubin, will likely join the team full-time to speed things up if/when I'll find extra funds for it.

Infrastructure

We're constantly improving testing process of all the packages:

• Added Roave backwards compatibility check to packages with stable versions. It verifies that public API is not broken compared to the latest stable version.
• We are further moving from Travis to GitHub actions for both Yii 2 and Yii 3. They proved to be awesome and Travis recently cut OpenSource support, so it is great we have started early.
• We decided not to send coverage from PHPUnit to Scrutinizer CI anymore but generate it with Scrutinizer itself. It is way faster with the same result.
• Psalm proved to be very useful. Highly recommend it for your projects as well.
• Colors were added to GitHub actions console. Looks way better!

A few adjustments were made to the website. Mostly these are GitHub API deprecation fixes and minor frontend adjustments.

Yii 2 and Yii 1 PHPUnit compatibility patches were extracted into separate repository so in case you need to test your application on PHP 5.3 - PHP 8 range, these will be handy.

🔷 Yii 1

• Yii 1.1 will be supported for one more year thanks to Skillshare and Onetwist Software.
• Marco van 't Wout from Tremani web agency officially joined Yii maintenance 1.1 team.

🔷 Yii 2

Yii 2.0.39 was released enhancing dependency injection container and fixing more PHP 8 compatibility issues.

From the less visible improvements, we've changed the way annotations are generated for magic properties so now some IDEs, including PhpStorm, will recognize read-only and write-only properties.

The following extensions were released as well:

• Redis 2.0.14
• MongoDB 2.1.10
• Faker 2.0.5
• Bootstrap4 2.0.9
• Debug 2.1.14
• Auth Client 2.2.8
• Twig 2.4.1

🔶 Yii 3

The following package releases were made since last time:

• Injector 1.0.3
• Security 1.0.0

Overall plan is to prepare the packages listed in this Trello card.

There are multiple interesting decisions:

• All stable releases will start with 1.0.0. Previously a variant of starting with 3.0.0 was discussed.
• Yii 3.0 packages will support PHP 7.4.
• Default configurations were added to majority of packages. Most will work without any extra configuration or with minimal of configuration.
• Configuration providers are mostly removed from packages and apps.

There is a Trello board with tasks we're working on including ones not reflected in GitHub issues.

Nearly every package received cleanup, PHP 8 compatibility and bug fixes. Below are some selected highlights.

New packages

Some new packages were created both as a result of extracting common parts of existing packages and new ideas.

• JWT authentication method.
• Yii Swagger.
• Draft version of API template was created. It is more like a demo now but later part of current code will be deleted, so it will become a real template to start your APIs with.
• Request model. It helps to validate and transform request data before using it.
• Middleware dispatcher was extracted out of the router and request-model.
• Error handler was moved out of yii-web.

Development tool

• Dependencies were revised and Dockerfile was added.
• Ability to semi-automatic release tagging was implemented.

Composer config plugin

Temporary PHP 8 support was added. It's not the same as our AST effort and is meant to ease checking things for PHP 8 while we're finishing AST version.

Container and factory

• Dependencies were actualized for both packages.
• Self-referencing container definition hack is no longer needed.
• Support for PHP 8 union types.
• Dependencies are now resolved for both constructor and method when calling non-static factories such as 'engine' => [EngineFactory::class, 'createMethod'].
• Definitions are now resolved in array configs.
• Callable arguments are now resolved from DI container. Added Reference::toCall().
• Any definition could now be used for constructor arguments.

Cache

• Removed cache key normalization and non-string keys support.

Bulma

• More docs, better naming.
• Added ability to use icons in dropdown menu.
• All widgets were made immutable.

Router

• Router internals and configuration were both made simpler by extracting routes collection into separate class.
• UrlMatcherInterface::getLastMatchedRequest() was removed and getCurrentUri() was added.
• UrlMatcher is now optional which is handy for console applications.

Application templates and demo

• NodeJs is no more required. Assets are fetched from asset packagist.
• Configs were significantly cleaned up. In the app, they were split per-package.
• Self-referencing container definition hack was removed.
• Swagger was added to yii-demo. It can be accessed via /swagger.
• Multiple refactorings were made in yii-demo.
• yii-demo PSR-7 implementation was switched to httpsoft/http-message.

Var dumper

• Added asPhpString() method to export anything as code including closures.

Files

• filterPath method was improved to allow callback-filters.

Cycle

• File schema is now writeable and supports multiple files to read from.
• Our own DI container / factory are now used so Cycle integration is now PHP 8 compatible.

Data

• Interfaces were adjusted a bit.

DBAL and ActiveRecord

Both DBAL and ActiveRecord ported from Yii 2 have lots of refactoring to be done despite functionally they were significantly cleaned up and mostly work.

Arrays

• Removing value by path was moved to a separate method.
• ArrayHelper::isTraversable() was removed in favor of using is_iterable() directly.

HTML

• Cleanup was made.
• Added Html::generateId().
• Added option "wrapInput" for checkbox and radio.
• "aria" was added to data attributes.
• Removed Html::getAttributeName.
• Removed escapeJsRegularExpression, add normalizeRegexpPattern.
• Added encoding methods for different contexts: HTML attribute, HTML attribute without quotes, JavaScript string value.
• decode() was removed.

Debugger

• Detail object data was added to API.
• There is progress on debugger frontend.
• Added ability to set history size.

Queue

• Significant cleanup, more tests.
• Signal loop was improved by introducing soft memory limit, extra events and signals config.
• Documentation was updated.
• Separate payloads were removed simplifying everything.

Translator

i18n packages were deprecated, translator packages were introduced with adjusted design.

📙 New and adjusted docs

• 000 - Packages
• 003 - Roadmap
• 010 - Code Style
• 016 - Security workflow
• Cookies
• Aliases

📚 Reading recommendations and other news

• On not choosing WordPress for the W3C redesign project. W3C, an organization that works on web standards, chose Yii2-powered Craft CMS to power their website.
• Composer 2 was released. We are ready, so you can upgrade and get significant performance improvement.
• Yii 2 PhpStorm plugin was updated to fix compatibility with latest IDE versions.
• PHP 8.0: What's New and Changed.

❤️ Thank you!

I'd like to thank all backers and contributors making Yii 3 possible. We are moving it forward together.

👍 Special thanks for Yii 3 code contributions goes to:

• Wilmer Arambula.
• Rustam Mamadaminov.
• mj4444.
• Dmitriy Gritsenko.
• Roman Tsurkanu.
• yiiliveext.
• Sergei Predvoditelev.
• DarkDef.
• Viktor Babanov.
• Dzianis Jackievič.
• Alexander Nekrasov.
• Anton Samoylenko.
• Dmitry Derepko.
• Alexey Chernousov.
• Andrii Vasyliev.
• wiperawa.
• Aleksei Gagarin.
• Bruce Aldridge.
• Sergei Iamskoi.
• Maksym Storchak.
• Evgeniy Tkachenko.